FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive.

Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding.

(Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)

The boss battles weren't that hard. The issue was the un-skippable cut-scenes.

Generally. I don't like playable dream sequences or artistic filler sequences in games. I feel like there are a lot of people that working in gaming that couldn't get into Movies/TV and as a result try to insert that sort of story telling into a form of entertainment where it doesn't belong.

The best in game story telling IMO was the Doom 2016 game, where the physicality of the character was done through the short sequences where control was briefly taken away. Unfortunately they undid this (mostly) in subsequent sequels .

On the switch there were only two of those walls that I hit, I didn't really do any grinding outside of those points. It turned out the first one had a trick to beat it, grinding didn't actually help that much, and the second was the final boss...